The non-profit organization, Wikimedia Foundation, which powers the online encyclopedia ‘Wikipedia’, has lodged three lawsuits against Anatoly Razinkin, the First Deputy Prosecutor General, in Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court according to court records.
The plaintiff, Wikimedia Foundation, is requesting the court to wholly declare the Prosecutor General’s demands for implementing measures to restrict access to Wikipedia’s resources from July 5, 2023, as illegal. It also wants the court to invalidate notices from Roskomnadzor, the regulatory body, about violating the order of disseminating information, which specifies the URLs containing corresponding infringements.
These demands, identical in all three registered lawsuits, were reported by Vedomosti with reference to the court’s press service’s statement. As the operator of Wikipedia, the non-profit organization regularly faces fines for refusal to remove content banned by Russian laws. In 2023 alone, the organization was subjected to administrative penalties in the form of fines, totaling over 18 million rubles.
